eccuity Podcasts

Kai Malte Röver is a German-born industrial designer with 20+ years building products across the world, from six-axis robots for Toyota to the next-generation medical scanner that just earned his Christchurch company FDA clearance. After a culture shock in Japan forced him to learn the language and rethink everything, he saw how differently people see the world. He explains why getting out of your bubble is the key to staying relevant, and why simplicity is the hardest thing to design.

Christine Liggins is co-founder and CEO of the DebtFix Foundation, a charity helping 8,000 New Zealand families a year escape debt. Two decades on the front line have shown her who's really drowning, and it isn't who you'd expect: her average client earns good money yet owes around $80,000 on cards and loans. She reveals why she calls bankruptcy a weapon of mass destruction, why money now drives our mental health crisis, and the one move almost nobody makes when the repayments start to slip.

Kristina Mydlar, founder of Mydlar Consulting, a boutique London firm that helps fintech and financial services companies put AI to work where it actually makes a difference. Kristina spent over 20 years in banking and finance before everything changed in a single evening. During COVID, she found out from a Financial Times article on a Monday night that the company she worked for was being shut down. A few days later a stranger messaged her on LinkedIn asking for help, she remembered a line from Richard Branson about saying yes when opportunity knocks, and a business was born. Her partners have since raised over a billion pounds in equity for their clients.

Paul Tranter, a serial entrepreneur from Birmingham whose life has taken more turns than almost anyone we've had on the show.

Peter Bird, a registered nurse who spent 25 years in occupational health before a health scare made him look closely at what he, and everyone around him, was actually eating. Peter built Kaiwise. You scan a barcode and a simple traffic light system tells you the truth about what you're holding, the level of processing, the additives, the things the label would rather you didn't notice. No advertising, no brand deals, no judgement.

Every founder talks about growth. Raise the round, hit the milestones, scale the team. Nobody warns you about the price tag that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet. In this compilation episode of Ways to Wealth, Charlie Meaden pulls together four conversations that each answer the same uncomfortable question from a completely different angle.

Deborah grew up on a sheep and grain farm in Southland, the oldest of four in a family with 55 first cousins. She wanted to be an astronaut, until the Air Force told her women weren't allowed to be pilots. So, she became an electrical engineer instead, then rebranded into IT when she realised the people there earned three times what she did. In 2000 she co-founded Run the Red, the company that taught New Zealand how to text, and sold it to Pushpay in 2014.

Nathan has spent 30 years in advertising. He's worked with Nike, Adidas, PlayStation, Budweiser, and the BBC, and lived in New York, London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm before landing in Auckland. So when he talks about how attention actually works, he's not guessing.

Matt runs a $100 million portfolio. In practice, he thinks about something most CEOs never have to. He is not managing money for shareholders who want a return next quarter. He is managing it for 200,000 people, most of them young, many of them paycheck to paycheck, across generations that stretch back to the signing of He Whakaputanga and forward to grandchildren not yet born.

Thomasge Aravinda, founder of CareerCraft and a supply chain professional who spent 15 years working across Sri Lanka, Dubai, Singapore, and New Zealand before building a business around the question most people are too comfortable to ask: is my career still going to exist? Thomasge started helping friends land jobs during COVID when the market seized up and nobody knew what to do. He was good at it. People started telling him to turn it into something real. When he dug into the research, he found that almost everything people rely on to advance their careers, the CV, the LinkedIn profile, the degree, is about to stop being enough. Within the next few years, he believes you will need video just to prove you are a real person and not a bot.

Eight years ago, a crypto client asked Alexa if she could help host a dinner at the World Economic Forum. She didn't have a plan for it. She had a business partner in Switzerland who could open a few doors. They hosted one dinner, and people kept coming back for more. She never intended to build a company around it. The company built itself around her.

Learn how Lorraine Miller, co-founder of Foot Mechanics, New Zealand's largest privately owned podiatry business, and co-founder of Whai Basketball in Tauranga, has spent 29 years building businesses side by side with her husband. They are 50/50 partners in everything they own. At one point they were running a podiatry business, two Rodney Wayne hair salons, a Robert Harris cafe, and an 18-property portfolio all at once.

Marcus Nelson, co-founder of UserVoice, the feedback tab that sat on the side of Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft Xbox before most people knew what customer feedback software was. He sold the company last year and moved to New Zealand as a single father with his youngest son. This conversation covers why raising capital before you have paying customers is one of the most destructive things a founder can do, why technology is becoming commoditised and brand is about to matter more than product.

Manu Caddie and Kenny Au are the co-founders of GEMS, an asset management platform built for the people who keep New Zealand's electricity, water, and critical infrastructure running. Both spent decades inside the industry before deciding that the tools they were forced to use were not fit for purpose. Then Manu and Kenny decided to build something better.

Jase Te Patu, founder of Hauora Aotearoa and a man who has spent 33 years in wellbeing work, driven by something deeply personal. He started this charity because his brother passed away and left eight kids behind. When he asked his 12-year-old niece how she was doing, she told him she couldn't sleep because every time she closed her eyes she wanted to be with her dad. That conversation broke something open for him and set the direction for everything that followed.

Anne Cullen, a relationship advisor who works with entrepreneurs and high performers navigating the overlap between business and family life, spent the first half of her life in the US and the second in New Plymouth, New Zealand. She started out working with kids and families before realising that the parents she understood best were the ones who thought like founders. The ones building something while raising someone at the same time.

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Will Zhang, CEO of EmoX, an AI mental health companion. Will talks to us about a side effect of AI that nobody in the productivity conversation seems to be addressing: when your team can research in two minutes instead of three days, you end up making 10 to 20 times more decisions per day. You might be creating more value, but your mental health is dropping. His closing advice is two words: just be human.

This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Yashar Ahmadpour, co-founder and CEO of Impressive, an agentic AI company based in San Francisco. Yashar was born and raised in Sweden to Chilean and Iranian parents, moved to California to study, and ended up in tech after a degree in literature and writing. About the state of the Ai industry, and the subversive actions startups are taking to rip off investors.

Jon Randles, a business coach who co-founded Mosh in 2009, and spent years growing revenue without keeping any of it. When a business coach came in and helped them go from six figures in debt to six figures in the bank within 12 months, it changed how Jon thought about everything. Three years ago, he drew an org chart on a whiteboard, realised there was no circle that needed him, rubbed out his own job, and stepped away. Revenue went up.

Kim left employment last year to start a boutique agency and expected it would take years to move into fractional marketing leadership. It took months. Small and medium businesses kept coming to her with the same problem: they knew they needed marketing, they had pieces in place, but nobody was connecting the dots or telling them what to actually focus on first.